Sales Intelligentsia

Ten Prospects For Success

The value of taking the time to profile good customers and target similar groups is particularly high for salespeople because we often don’t need large numbers of customers to prosper. In fact this is the great advantage we have over large companies with large overhead who must sell great quantities to earn enough profit. The average salesperson will probably do very well adding as few as one to ten new customers each year, particularly if those customers are exceptional. But what is an exceptional customer?
Let’s look at John K. who runs a landscaping company that specializes in designing, building and maintaining small but beautiful garden areas for urban dwellers and businesses. John’s edge is the fact that he offers one-stop shopping: He plans, builds and maintains, making it easy for his customers to have the garden they want without dealing with numerous contractors. The downside of his business is that he is limited by his size to doing a relatively small number of gardens.
John’s customers are highly educated, urban homeowners who are in a high income bracket and often hold executive positions or own their own businesses. They have limited time but a lot of disposable income. Once they contract with John they typically stay customers until they move or retire. He services about 25 homes and businesses and has a turnover of about 25% requiring that he add 5 customers annually to maintain his current sales level. If he wants to grow he should be adding around ten per year.
The challenge for John is to find the ten exceptional customers that will not only stay with him for years but will also make regular referrals. He already knows what type of people they will be and where he is likely to find them in his city. He can target his marketing efforts directly at these demographically distinct individuals. His ads, brochures and networking will focus exclusively on the best prospects and the responses they generate will be pre-qualified before he starts the sales process.
In addition to making the sales process much easier, targeting also helps generate referrals, references and networking opportunities. A landscaper like John will be in regular contact with his customers and their friends will see the results of his labors. This will generate referrals. Good quality referrals often do not require any selling other than price and schedule negotiations. Various networking opportunities arise as he is invited to social opportunities and community get-togethers that his customers attend. By sharing this part of their lifestyle he becomes an even more likely resource for them to refer others to.

Relationship Selling

John’s selling style is based on developing valuable and mutually beneficial relationships with his customers that generate rewards for both parties. The exceptional customers you should be seeking will expect something of value from their relationship with you. The values most prized in a business relationship are trust, quality, time and money. Offer these to the right group of prospects and your selling will become much easier.
Prospecting for exceptional customers and preparing your products so that they completely fulfill those customer’s needs can take much of the mystery out of sales. Target the right customer groups, send the message they want to hear and provide the stellar service they expect and your sales will close themselves. Skip these steps and you’ll spend a lot more time selling and have a much lower ratio of success to failure.
Knowing your prospective customer’s lifestyles and reaching out to them are only part of the whole prospecting process. You must also tailor your products to fit their needs and desires. The more perfect the fit between product and customer the easier the sale.

Sales Prospecting: A Geology Lesson

Before anyone becomes a customer they are a prospective customer or prospect in sales lingo. Depending on what it is that you sell, your prospects can range from almost anyone on the planet to a very few select individuals who have a specific need for your products. Selling something like food that everyone needs is very different than selling something very specialized like enterprise supply chain software. If you own a grocery store your prospects are so universal that you really don’t need to do any prospecting to find the ideal customer. Anyone on the street is a likely prospect.
It is almost a given that most salespeople have a much narrower potential market because it is in the nature of salespeople to be specialists. You must go prospecting to find those specific people who have a demonstrated need for your products and the ability to pay for them. Before you do any selling you need customers and the more targeted you are in seeking those customers the easier it will be to sell them.

Targeting

Target markets are groups of people who share a similar set of demographics, i.e. similar lifestyles, interests, income and education levels, backgrounds, etc. When you’re selling a very specific set of solutions (your product) you need to target your efforts at groups of people whose demographic profiles fit your market. Before this gets too confusing let’s look at it another way.
The original use of the word prospecting meant searching for valuable minerals or resources like gold or oil. Prospectors used everything from rumor to science to find likely spots before they started digging. Now, geologists use their knowledge of geological science to identify areas likely to produce riches. They look at local geology, rock formations and make-up, overall global geology including things like plate tectonics, that tell them where the mineralogical action is. Only after comparing hundreds of potential sites and doing exhaustive research will they recommend that the expense and massive effort of digging a mine be undertaken. Their preliminary research is designed to minimize risk and maximize return.
The amount of prospecting for likely customers that you do will have the same result. If you picked ten people at random from a crowd and gave them your sales pitch you would be lucky to sell even one of them, no matter what you were selling. If you put together a demographic profile of people likely to need your product and targeted a group of ten people with that profile including a proven need and the ability to pay, your closing ratio (or sales success rate) would be much higher, perhaps even 100%!
The importance of this aspect of the sales process cannot be underestimated. If you do an excellent job of prospecting to find an ideal customer group for your business, the sales process will become immensely easier and far less mysterious. You will spend less time explaining, little time cajoling and no time talking people into anything because they will already have a defined need for your products and a demonstrated desire to buy. If you are lucky you’ll become what many so-called ‘professional’ salespeople often deride: An order taker.

Order Takers

In the sales profession an order taker is a salesperson who sits and takes orders from anyone who walks in or calls needing their products. They don’t pitch, close or ‘hammer’ their customers, they simply take orders. Salespeople who must fight for every order and go out and constantly drum up new business put down order takers as unimaginative and unskilled clerical types. I see it a little differently.
As a salesperson you are not just a professional, you are a business owner. Your interest is in generating work, income and profits, not just sales. For many of us being order takers would be an almost ideal situation. We’d sit in our offices or shops and customers would come to us ready and willing to buy on the spot. It sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
The degree to which you are a salesperson vs. an order taker is determined by marketing and the type of business you’re in. Marketing is everything you do to bring customers to you prior to the sales process and everything you do afterwards to ensure their loyalty and generate future business. Sales is a part of the marketing process, the vital part where you turn prospects into customers. You have to learn your own science of prospecting geology and how to find the signs and formations that point you to the gold. With the right targeted profile you can reach out via marketing and work your way to becoming a very happy order taker.

Customer Profiling

I’m going to assume you already know something about your customers, even if you’re just starting out. That knowledge may not be accurate or even useful but it will serve to get us started creating a profile of a typical customer for your products. Start by listing any common attributes your current customers share. Some to consider include:
• Age
• Income Range
• Location
• Education including number of years and major interest
• Job Description
• Interest group membership including associations, industry or academic groups, hobbyist groups, etc.
• Sex, religious background, ethnic background, race, etc. Note: This information is gathered to help to find and sell to your prospects, not as exclusionary criteria. The more you know, the better equipped you are to serve their needs.
As you consider each likely or proven customer make notes of any attributes or interests that are common to the majority. These are pointers which can lead you to like-minded people who may share a need for your products. They also help you to create profiles of highly profitable customers so that you can go out into the marketplace and focus your sales efforts on similar prospects.

Selling Is Communicating

Selling is much more than a survival technique. It is a whole panorama of interesting and challenging skills, experiences and learning opportunities. It’s human interaction, education and motivation. Ultimately the ability to sell is the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of diverse people.
Is it a talent? We often hear about ‘natural born salespeople’ who somehow have an edge over the rest of us. We repeatedly convince ourselves that we have no such natural ability until the words resonate in our heads whenever we consider selling. I don’t believe in natural sales ability or the lack thereof. What I do know is that some people have persistence and motivation and work constantly on their skills and that these people make great salespeople. They also make great bakers, consultants, graphic designers, athletes and politicians. They tend to be attracted to working on their own and succeeding or failing on their own merits. Sound familiar? It’s the same profile that leads to choosing self-employment as a way of life.

You’re A Natural

We all have good sales skills when it comes to getting what we want, especially when we’re young. Children regularly gather information about a desired toy or event and batter their parents relentlessly with that information. They use sales techniques that would make the slimiest used car dealer back off including blackmail, intimidation, acting out, hunger strikes, declarations of war and withholding of love to achieve their desires. When they win it is usually because they have eventually discovered the secret to all successful sales: Solving A Problem. The fact that they may have created the problem in the first place doesn’t mean that it is any less dire by the time their parents cave in.
Problems and Solutions
While you could employ the drastic sales techniques you used as a child in your business I doubt they would work as well. We’re adults and we don’t accept such behavior from our peers. Even if we did buy, we would never return and would undoubtedly steer others away from such a nasty individual. Because the success of most self-employed people is dependent on repeat business and referrals, the unrepentant childlike seller would soon be out of business.
Fortunately there is an important lesson embedded in these childhood experiences. The way to get someone interested in your work is to offer a solution to a pressing problem they have. You don’t need to be a quivering bundle of raging charisma to do this. You simply need to make a connection, learn about the problem, present a valuable solution and ask them to do business with you. This is the basic process of selling which underlies every transaction between humans: Meeting, gathering information, identifying problems, offering solutions and agreeing to terms. This site was written to help sales people like yourself understand sales as a process and to learn that process so you can apply it your individual business.